


good enough

by humvee



Series: and then you [1]
Category: Generation Kill
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-03
Updated: 2014-10-03
Packaged: 2018-02-19 11:29:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2386706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/humvee/pseuds/humvee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s not so much that Nate misses having someone at his six; he doesn’t need that anymore. He just misses their eyes on his back. He’s not sure that he’s being completely honest when he lumps the entire platoon into the category of ‘their,’ but he can think about that later.</p>
            </blockquote>





	good enough

There’s an e-mail.

Nate actually leans back and then forward, staring at his formerly clean inbox. He barely suppresses the urge to get violent.

Why, for the love of all that is holy, is there an e-mail? It’s—yep, it just changed, it’s officially 5:00 pm right now. Technically speaking, he’s not _contractually_ obligated to acknowledge it. He could go home, right now, but he figures it’s his fault for not heeding Rick’s ten-minutes-‘til-five cell phone alarm.

He sighs and clicks on it. If it’s the guy in the IT department warning him to change his password again, he decides he’s going to go down there and do more than change his password. His hand actually hovers by the shutdown option in the menu, and then he tells himself he’s being dramatic and opens the e-mail.

The trepidation was probably warranted, because it’s so blank and devoid of his coworkers’ multicolored, eight-line signatures that at first Nate thinks spam somehow got through the filter and now the IT guy is going to give him shit for the rest of his life. That possibility alone makes him consider unemployment as an alternative career choice. He looks at the sender: colbert12b@gmail.com.

Nate’s eyes dart down to the message. It’s just a link, signed “Brad.” His breath leaves him for the briefest moment. _Brad_ —that’s pretty much it for his thoughts for now, just that, until Nate’s brain finally catches up. This sounds like him, feels like him—this is what he would do if something happened to someone in the platoon, just send a stupid CNN article with no comment, to let Nate know, the inscrutable brevity—

Relax, Nate tells himself. It’s not a CNN article, Brad would never e-mail him or even have his work e-mail, and the url is unrecognizable. Nate doesn’t need manhood enhancements, thanks. Maybe he should actually change his damn password. He deletes the message, shuts down the computer, and tells himself he’ll throw away the three empty Starbucks cups that litter his floor when he comes back after the weekend.

On the subway he forgets about the e-mail itself—the name is common enough—but he thinks about Brad. It’s been a long time, he considers, and then catches himself. It’s been a year, says the voice in his head. Yeah, well, a little under that. Ten months, comes another voice, and Nate pushes it away. He doesn’t really keep in touch with anyone, which is fine, because it still feels a little inappropriate, uneasy, to him. He hates thinking it, but it’s there. There’s a clear divide, which still exists long after his bars are no longer at his neck. God, he hates thinking this, but now he’s too tired to police his thoughts too strictly. He knows he’s not superior—and he can’t find an adjective that doesn’t sound wrong to him—not by any means, but he knows, somehow, the men— _his_ men, at one point—can’t shake the feeling that they’re obligated to think so. It’s worse that in Nate’s most tired thoughts he knows they’re resentful that they can’t think so; there’s respect there but he’s not sure it’s the kind he wants, and—now he stops himself, angry.

Mike—and it actually feels weird to call him that, even though that’s how he signs off on his sporadic e-mails, ones that Nate always replies to by starting off with “Gunny”—tells him some things, sometimes. Poke this, Ray that, Ray some more of that, Walt married, etc. etc. It makes him smile, but it arouses thoughts that aren’t particularly welcome. He wants and doesn’t want to be more involved. It’s impossible anyway, but he wants to care. And Nate’s noticed the conspicuous absence of a name he feels similarly guilty about.

Maybe he’ll ask Gunny about it in their next exchange, whenever that is, he thinks. Satisfied, he leans back and watches the ceiling lights sway with the motion of the subway car until he hears Farragut West and gets off.

Nate finds himself on his laptop in front of the TV two hours later, a beer bottle absentmindedly at his mouth and glasses slipping off of his nose. He’s not sure what he’s looking at anymore, the TV—which, now that he focuses, has apparently been on fucking CSPAN for at least the past hour—or his computer screen, open to a blank e-mail with mikewynn99@hotmail.com in the address bar. Nate stretches from his really uncomfortable slump in the recesses of the couch and takes another sip of his beer. It’s flat now, and he’s not quite sure how he spent the past hour, but that lapse in time probably started with the e-mail that’s in front of him.

After a furious sixty seconds of typing and hitting the delete key, he has the ridiculously blithe and altogether really fucking weird result:

 

> Hi Gunny,
> 
> Hope you’re doing well; haven’t heard from you in a while. I’m doing good; the internship is going well, might want to stay here for a while (optimistically assuming all other variables facilitative). Weather here cooling down significantly already. Any news from you or the platoon?

“All other variables facilitative”? Nate leans back over his couch to look at the clock in his kitchen. It’s nine, and he’s a little pathetic. He finishes his beer—hey, at least he’s not without alcohol on this Friday night—and turns around to peer through the window. It’s raining. He goes back to his laptop, and deletes everything but the first two sentences minus the parentheses, adding: “P.S. Heard from Brad?” After another unrewarding tip of the bottle, he wants to slap himself. He sounds like a thirteen-year-old girl, and oddly enough he hears that comment in Brad’s sardonic tones. Eventually he avoids accidentally sending the clever message of “Hi Gunny,” and deletes the draft completely.

Then he Googles: “can palm pilots get viruses,” but closes his laptop before he can read the answers. Disgusted with himself, he throws the beer in the recycling and goes to take a shower. When he comes out, he’s already toweling his hair with one hand and on his phone with the other, trying to one-handedly sign into his work e-mail.

Password expired. Of course.

: : :

Nate sleeps through most of the weekend. He wakes up on Saturday at four in the afternoon, wondering what the hell happened. Sunday is spent jogging through the neighborhood, holding the stitch in his side and asking himself why he decided to ever take a break from running. He goes to sleep early again and justifies his nonexistent social life with the fact that he has to go to work tomorrow, and he can’t remember if it’s his turn to get the donuts. Whatever, Nate thinks as he falls asleep, he’ll get them anyway.

 

Nate is waiting for his Outlook to boot up while he’s clearing away the Starbucks detritus around his desk. The screen eventually pops up, and the first e-mail he sees is the one from not-Brad, some other “Colbert B” whose account was compromised and who is now sending Nate these unfortunate links offering him Viagra knockoffs. He opens his left-hand drawer, where he keeps his phone and wallet during the day, and almost faints.

“Jesus Christ!”

Rick is doubled over, laughing and possibly crying. Nate throws the thing at him and it hits him with a slap. Rick is still laughing minutes later when Nate comes over to look at whatever is now lying on the ground.

“What _is_ that?” he asks, prodding it with his foot.

“Oh my God,” says Rick, wiping tears from his cheeks. “That was priceless. God, I wish someone got your face on video. Or camera. Anything. I want this company’s employees to view that in the generations to come.”

Nate picks it up. It’s a George W. Bush mask, the kind they apparently now sell everywhere.

“Nice,” Nate says, and smiles a little despite his still-racing heart.

“Happy election day!”

“Thanks,” says Nate drily. “I appreciate the thought.”

“Could you tell, though?” Rick asks, leaning against the feeble branches of the office plant. “That it was a face?”

“Yeah,” Nate says, “that might have explained why I almost pissed myself.”

“I guess four years in the military can’t even prepare you for that.”

Which reminds him.

 

“You know,” says the voice on the line, and Nate feels a chill run through him for no reason, “I thought you’d call when Casey Kasem retired.”

“What?” says Nate, caught off-guard. “He left too?”

There’s a gravelly laugh. “The real Casey Kasem. Not the fucknut we have all come to know and love.”

“Well, I’m calling with actual congratulations,” says Nate, trying to steer the conversation back on track.

“You are?” says Brad, sounding a little confused. “Maybe it’s you who should be congratulated. Congratulations on the commission. And on the, uh, leave-taking. Sorry I couldn’t be there.”

“I—” starts Nate, feeling a little deflated. He could have lived without the reminder. “Well, I was calling with what I thought would definitely merit congratulations. I assume you voted, and that you live in a reasonably populated area with a cable connection or, at the very least, newspapers.”

“If that’s your way of telling me you’re disappointed about the results of the election, sir, I can’t say I’m particularly sympathetic at the moment. Thanks for the congratulations, though. I’m reasonably pleased with my choice of party affiliation.”

Nate laughs. What a ridiculously Colbertesque sentence. “Contrary to what you might expect, I wasn’t a huge fan of Kerry.”

“But he won three Purple Hearts,” says Brad sarcastically.

“Yeah,” Nate blandly agrees.

“So I take it you didn’t read the e-mail?”

“What e-mail?” Nate asks out of reflex. “Oh, right. The link. Actually, I didn’t.”

“So…this phone call…”

“The company servers thought it was spam,” Nate says simply. “So I didn’t click on the link.”

Brad laughs again. “Great.”

“Yeah, the whole generic e-mail address and lack of text might have given that impression.”

“Company servers, huh?”

“Yeah,” says Nate.

“Harvard has company servers now?”

Nate laughs. “To answer your direct question without addressing your refusal to ask it, no, no Harvard yet. You still have to apply for these things.”

“Really, sir? No Ivy League circle jerk punch card like they have for frozen yogurt? Go to one, get the next one free?”

“Unfortunately.” Nate can’t help but wonder how Brad knew he was planning on it. He didn’t remember telling anyone. Maybe it was an easy guess. “And although I realize it might have been difficult to tell what I did with my free time in Iraq, I was not looking over college brochures. I realize how old that phrase makes me sound.” Nate realizes he’s been talking for a while and shuts up.

Brad hums. “Civilian life seems to be treating you well, then.” There’s an awkward pause, and Brad says, “So how many bumper stickers do you have on your car now?”

Of course. “Your lack of faith in me is astounding. There’s one, but it’s from the Firestone tire company and I can’t get it off.” That seemed a little personal, Nate thinks. Oh well.

They talk for a while more. Brad makes veiled references to his life back in San Diego, and only finds it necessary to mention at the very end of their conversation that he’s in England now, with the Royal Marines. Brad’s abrupt goodbye is as startling as the last update he decided to drop on Nate. Apparently he had been there since April. “Kept the American phone number, though,” Brad had added mysteriously, and hung up.

Nate replaces the receiver and suddenly feels very young. Twenty-six felt different this morning. He turns back to his e-mail.

: : :

Just like that, though, they slide back into it. It’s easy, falling back into the rhythm they always had and the friendship they never did. It’s not so much that Nate misses having someone at his six; he doesn’t need that anymore. He just misses their eyes on his back. He’s not sure that he’s being completely honest when he lumps the entire platoon into the category of ‘their,’ but he can think about that later. Right now, his phone is ringing.

“I am covered in dog shit,” Brad growls, and it sounds like there’s some kind of yelping in the background. “Everything. Everything in the apartment. The fucking walls. It’s seven pounds! How the fuck does this happen?”

The image is horrifying. Nate is desperately trying to scramble up some facts. Brad has a dog? “Did solitude finally get to the Iceman?”

“Ha,” barks Brad. “Unlikely. I’m pet-sitting this deranged dog for a friend and mark my words, I am never doing it again.”

“Seventy pounds, though?” Nate thinks back to what kind of dogs they have in England. Lassie? “Does everyone really own a Shetland sheepdog up there?”

“Seventy? It’s _seven_ pounds. It’s a Yorkie _and it’s currently on my bed_ ,” shouts Brad, and for a few seconds there’s a lot of noise. Nate is a little concerned for the dog.

“I thought you loved dogs,” ventures Nate. “I seem to distinctly remember a heated argument with Person about the merits of dogs over cats.”

“I do,” says Brad. “This is not a dog. This is a glorified squirrel.”

“I would like to be reassured that it is still safe and in one piece.”

“You can be assured of this, sir,” says Brad. “The threat has been neutralized.”

“I’m a little worried about the implications of that statement. I hope you have a crate.”

“A shoebox would work,” grunts Brad. “But no. It is taking advantage of my unceasing mercy and is now sitting in my lap, still alive.”

Okay, thinks Nate when Brad finally hangs up under the pretenses of taking the dog—whose name is Fritz—for a walk; so their conversations the past two months have been about politics, Europe’s inadequate living amenities, the weather, and now dog shit. He wasn’t exactly expecting discourses on Tolstoy, though, so he’ll take what he can get. He finds it odd that he has to remind himself that he doesn’t have a goal for these conversations. This is good enough, and he’ll be okay if this as good as it ever gets. He doesn’t need to talk about much else. He also now has the mental image of Brad holding a pint-sized dog, so there’s that. Nate avoids any kind of comment on the feelings that might arouse in him. Then he gets the photographic image, and all he has to say about that is that Fritz is a Pekingese, and he’s not sure what Brad thinks a Yorkie looks like.

December rolls around and Nate makes the drive up to Baltimore in a rental car; his car doesn’t have four-wheel drive, and the roads are ridiculously icy. He leaves the day after Christmas, though, making excuses about work. His parents obviously don’t buy it, but they let him go. He feels guilty enough that he stops three times on the highway back to DC and then leaves the car parked outside his apartment until his rental time is up. He keeps looking out the window like he’ll get in it and drive back, but he doesn’t.

He spends the next two weeks feeling like he has something bigger to do, to go back to, but he doesn’t. It’s unnerving and he wishes he knew what it was about. There’s nothing for him to do; he cleans his apartment three times and even goes to IKEA in an effort to do something akin to renovation. He ends up building three shelves, taking one down to return it; he goes running. The only thing left untouched in his apartment are the stack of master’s degree program brochures, which are left in a conspicuous space, as though he’s afraid he’ll forget about it if he puts them in a drawer. He attributes the unsettling feeling of an impending decision to the brochures waiting for him. Nate develops a bizarrely dependent relationship with Bobby Flay and his grill, gets through Bing West’s entire writing career, and engages in long conversations with himself in the cereal aisles in various supermarkets. The conclusion he comes to is that, in the event of, say, a blizzard, he’d rather be stuck in a Target than any other store. It’s very multi-purpose.

It hasn’t been a very productive holiday season.

 

“It hasn’t been a very productive holiday season,” Nate is saying, balancing a gallon of milk and a bag of cheese puffs in his arms. He’s already decided that he is stubbornly _not_ going to acknowledge the pathetic suggestions that his purchases make about his life.

“I can barely hear you,” Brad complains. “Are you calling me on a potato?”

Nate starts laughing so hard he almost drops what he’s holding. “No,” he says, still giggling. “It’s called a Bluetooth, Brad, and it’s the mark of a professional.”

“I’m sure that’s exactly what Motorola told you.”

“It was, in fact.”

“Where are you? It sounds like Heathrow in there.”

“Safeway,” says Nate. “That’s not a boarding announcement, that’s someone requesting clean up on aisle three.”

“I’m assuming you’re in aisle three.”

“Very funny.”

“It bothers me, though, that you’re using a Bluetooth in a supermarket. Officers really are assholes.”

That startles Nate into laughter. “Yeah, I hear these are going to be standard-issue from now on.”

“Are you serious?”

“Of course not,” scoffs Nate.

“Sorry if I have little faith,” says Brad, “but certain experiences lead me to believe this could be a distinct possibility. Just a few cut-downs on LSA and now you’re got every POG that couldn’t find their ass with two hands and a map talking into a mic like they think they’re Mattis at a graduation ceremony.”

Nate’s in the checkout line now, so he tells Brad he’ll call him back. When he gets back to his apartment, he puts the groceries away and realizes he has a few e-mails to attend to.

None from Brad, though. There haven’t been any more of those since the first one, which he still hasn’t read.

There is, however, an email telling him that, somehow, his proposal packet is missing. He types back frantically that it was submitted two weeks ago, before the deadline. There’s no response within the hour.

Later, while he’s still recuperating from that revelation, he gets a call from his bank about checking fraud and something about closing his account.

“What the fuck is going on?” he screams to his empty apartment. His phone is ringing again, and he picks it up. The caller ID is foreign—Brad, possibly on a payphone. He assumes Brad has memorized his number like he’s memorized Brad’s. He does not want to talk to Brad, or anyone, but especially Brad, right now.

Nate answers anyway. He attempts to resume a normal conversation and it works for about two minutes.

“So how’s your day?” Brad asks.

“Fine,” says Nate. Why is he smiling? He can feel himself forcing his lips into a grin for no reason and God, that’s fucked up. “Okay.” As soon as he says it, he knows the line of synonyms is about to end badly. “Great. Kind of a fucking disaster. No, it’s—actually, it’s fine. Everything’s okay.”

“What happened?”

“No, it’s totally fine. How’s your day?”

He hopes Brad will keep talking. Thankfully, Brad does, but after a few more seconds it does nothing to stop him.

“Brad.”

“I—” stops Brad, confused and possibly somewhat annoyed at being interrupted, and then says, “What?”

Then it comes out: “Some fucking idiot secretary lost my proposal and now it’s past the deadline and they don’t have it. And then someone—somehow—my bank account is—I don’t even know—how the fuck is this happening to me?”

“Are you okay?”

“No, I’m not fucking okay!”

“If it’s a bad time, I’ll call back.”

“Yeah, thanks a lot, Brad,” he says sarcastically. “That really helps.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Nothing.”

There’s a pause. “Are you drunk?”

Something inside Nate cracks. “No, I’m not _drunk_! Sometimes I have problems that I can’t fully internalize, when it seems my entire life is falling ap—”

“I don’t even know what you’re talking about. From what you’ve told me it sounds like just some average everyday bullshit. You’re being a little dramatic.”

For some reason this calms him down a little bit. “That’s the point. These aren’t real fucking problems, Brad.”

“It’s good to have perspective,” comes the bland answer.

“It’s not fucking perspective.”

“Relax.”

“Jesus Christ, Brad, real fucking problems are life or death scenarios. They’re how to not get yourself and people you’re responsible for killed, and how to feed them, and how to write a fucking after-action report. Those are problems. These are not problems.”

“Okay—”

“Fuck. Fuck!” Nate shouts, pacing around the apartment. “God, I made a huge mistake.”

“Nate—”

“Stop interrupting!” he says, and rages on. Why is he so angry? “God, I made such a fucking mistake.” He knows he’s going to make an even bigger one right now, with what he’s going to say. “I can’t deal with these—non-issues, this fucking bank statement bullshit and lowlifes I can’t deal with and have no way of dealing with, not fucking legally.” Here it comes, he thinks, as the words leave his mouth: “I should have never fucking left.”

They’re not actually that momentous once he says them out loud, not like they were in his head. But he guesses they’ve been in his head so long they’ve lost their novelty.

“Uh,” is Brad’s answer.

“Thanks, Brad,” says Nate, still angry and wired and he doesn’t even know what to call this. “Thanks a lot. That’s exactly what I wanted to hear.” He looks down at his hand. It’s bleeding and he has no idea how he tore the skin off. Great, he thinks. All he needs now is the stigmata. He feels very, very deflated but the opposite of empty. He has no idea what to do. Brad starts saying something and Nate really doesn’t want to hear it. He hangs up, turns off his phone, and swallows vodka from the bottle he finds in his freezer until he falls asleep, because apparently he no longer knows how to handle life like an adult.

 

“If you ever do that again, I will kill you,” is the first thing that comes out of Brad’s mouth.

“I—”

“And then your relatives can choose whether they’d like to turn your phone off.”

“I’m—”

“And trust me, I have ways.”

“I trust you,” says Nate, and it accidentally comes out softer than he meant. He clears his throat and says, “Sorry. I think I got a little overwhelmed.”

“Yeah. A little.”

“That’s as much as my manhood will allow me to admit. Take it or leave it.”

Brad seems to take it, more interested in fixating on Nate’s choice of words in “manhood,” and they avoid that general topic of conversation until Brad says he has to go.

For reasons he can’t explain, Nate feels good, warm—until another email reminds him that he needs update his insurance information.

_Our records indicate that you have not updated your emergency contact information._

He didn’t, he realizes. He fixes his address, changing it from his previous mailing address in Baltimore to his own in DC. He skims the rest and scrolls down. His finger pauses on the submit button, however. He scrolls back up. There’s a little red exclamation mark near one of the subsections:

_Is this information still accurate? Our records indicate that this phone number is no longer in service._

It’s a painful reminder. He deletes his grandfather’s contact information and tries to submit the form, but it won’t let him:

_It appears you are missing information. Please go back and resolve the highlighted errors, then click resubmit._

Nate rubs his face. There are four boxes: his mother and father are listed; so is his sister. It’s forcing him to fill out all of the spaces, though. He considers putting down his brother-in-law’s office phone number, and he’s halfway through typing it in when he reads the small text under the bolded “Emergency Contact Information.”

_Your emergency list should include anyone who needs to be notified._

Nate snorts. Helpful. But there’s another little question mark button next to the sentence. The surprisingly large amount hover text reads:

 _This list shouldn't be limited to family members._ Nate skims through some of it. Parents, siblings, neighbors, doctors… Something catches his eye. _Contacts should be someone that will be able to initially handle receiving potentially devastating news about you. Choosing someone that is known to be extremely emotional over the phone might be a poor choice as a contact if the medical team needs to ask questions of the emergency contact. Choose someone that will be able to calmly answer any potential questions after being informed that you are injured or worse._

Well, Christ, Nate thinks, shuddering a little, that’s morbid. Nothing insurance companies like more than reminding you of your impending end. Still, though, the idea of that phone call evokes only one face, one posture, one pair of eyes.

He hesitates, but he types it out anyway. He doesn’t look the rest of the form over and hits submit. He feels a little selfish, but hey—it’s his own potential death, he figures he should be able to do what he wants.

: : :

“Nate Fick.”

“If I hear one more time about how the Corps of the ‘90s makes us look like pussies, I’m going to—”

“Don’t do anything rash,” says Nate, amused.

“You didn’t let me finish,” says Brad. “I’m going to go find the Vietnam vets and let _them_ piss all over me instead.”

Nate recoils at the image and laughs. Rick passes by the desk, giving him a look. Nate waves and ducks lower behind his computer monitor, like that gives him any cover. “I hope you know what you just said.”

“I stand by it,” said Brad stubbornly, and Nate suppresses another laugh. “Did I call you at work?”

“Yes.”

“Sorry, it’s later here. I’ll call back the next—”

“No, no, don’t—I can talk,” Nate says softly, and gets up to stand by the huge window across from the elevator entrance. He leans against it sideways, hiding the phone with his shoulder. It’s snowing; otherwise he would have gone outside. “Emergency,” he mouths at whoever walks by, smiling apologetically.

“I heard that.”

“There is no way,” replies Nate. “I barely made a noise.”

“The Corps didn’t spend all that money for nothing.”

“Oh yeah? On implants?”

“Yeah, sure sounds like an emergency,” says Rick, walking by again, and Nate covers the mouthpiece.

“Don’t you have somewhere to be? Like at your desk? Or under it?”

Rick smacks him with the folder he’s holding and goes back to his seat.

“I’m glad you have been alerted to what _you_ now sound like,” comes Brad’s sardonic voice.

“I meant hearing aids. I—never mind. It wasn’t funny.”

“Yeah, I find most officers get that removed in OCS.”

“A sense of humor?”

Brad makes a soft grunt of assent and the conversation trails off. Nate feels responsible for picking it back up.

“What time is it there?”

“Lunch.”

“Not out on the field?”

“Nope. Not today. And now that I don’t have talk radio…”

“Nothing quite works up your appetite like conservative pundits, huh?” grins Nate.

“If you didn’t have rank on me, sir, I’d be singing a very different tune right now.”

“As it is, though…” Nate prompts.

“As it is,” sighs Brad dramatically, “I am committed to complete political objectivity during this conversation.”

For once, Nate is determined to end the conversation on his own terms, without Brad suddenly cutting him off and saying goodbye. He almost accomplishes it.

Nate is saying goodbye when he realizes he’s still hearing Brad’s voice. “Are you still there? Brad?”

“I was just saying—if I were to come by sometime next month, you wouldn’t be busy?”

“Come by?”

Nate’s gearing up for the disappointment of a “never mind,” but instead Brad says, “Yeah. I’ve got a few days off.”

“And you’re choosing landlocked DC over the famed surfing waters of San Diego?” Nate hopes he didn’t overdo it in hiding his eagerness.

“I take it you’re busy.”

“No!” says Nate. “No, no. I’m just trying to cover up the fact that I have no social life whatsoever.”

“Not exactly a secret,” says Brad. “So I’ll see you in a couple of weeks.”

“Yeah,” says Nate. “Yeah, that sounds good.”

The line is dead. At least he technically got the last word in, he thinks, and chalks it up as a victory on the conversation front. He doesn’t realize what actually happened until he’s on the subway, and allows himself a brief moment of dread before he wills it away. Nothing is actually going to come of this, he tells himself, and assumes a facial expression he will later realize probably makes him look like he has bowel issues. He was going for stoic, so he probably didn’t quite get there. He’s a little less constipated and a little more composed when he gets off the subway and walks the rest of the way home.

 

Nate indulges in the assumption that it’s the last time they’ll ever speak about it, and that it’ll just fade away into the half-formed plans that count as fantasies in Nate’s head. But Brad brings it up again alarmingly soon.

“Sorry if I forced myself on you the other morning.”

Nate chokes a little on his water. “What?” he says, putting the phone between his ear and shoulder to reach for the remote. He mutes the TV because he isn’t quite sure he heard right.

“About leave.”

“Oh,” says Nate. Shit, he thinks. He over-played it. “I wasn’t—”

Brad laughs, but the laugh isn't like the one Nate’s gotten used to. “You don’t have to start apologizing. I understand. It was kind of out of the blue.”

“I didn’t mean that.”

Brad starts talking again and Nate takes a deep breath. “I just meant,” he says, no longer concerned about sounding casual, “that I could use a break, too. From here.”

Brad is quiet. Then Nate can almost hear the bright grin cracking his face. “All right, sir,” says Brad, “I’ll let you pick the honeymoon destination.”

Nate lets the breath he was holding turn into a laugh. “I’d suggest meeting halfway, but I think tickets to Greenland are kind of expensive.”

“I hear it’s nice this time of year, though.”

“Have you considered Siberia?”

Brad says something about Iceland and Nate is relieved. Maybe now they’ve both realized it’s impossible, not just geographically.

Nate thinks it’s his turn to make a response when he realizes Brad is still talking.

“Just let me,” says a soft voice barely recognizable as Brad’s. “We’ll figure it out from there.”

“Okay,” breathes Nate before he remembers his previous train of thought.

“All right,” says Brad, and then awkwardly cuts the conversation short. “Good night.”

Nate keeps the phone by his ear for a few at least thirty seconds before placing it carefully on the arm of the couch. He watches TV for three more minutes until he realizes it’s still on mute.

: : :

Nate is at the airport at five am. He hasn’t slept all night. There are two huge cups of Dunkin in the cupholders in the car; he drank a third one on the way here. He assumes that Brad probably likes his coffee black, but there’s a Dunkaccino next to it, just in case. He figures Brad has extreme preferences in coffee like he does in everything else, so whichever one he gags on is the one Nate will pretend to have bought for himself.

He checks his phone. It appears to be ringing.

“Hey,” says Brad, “there’s been a delay.”

Nate doesn’t realize how unusual that is until he realizes he’s not listening to a voicemail message.

“Wait—how are you calling me?”

Brad makes a noise of frustration. “We’re still on the ground. We’ll be there in eight hours.”

“You haven’t left yet?”

“I tried calling earlier, but I guess you were asleep. It’s the snow. Not engine failure or anything,” and the implicit _don’t worry_ hangs in the air between them. “I’ll be there on time, just eight hours later,” and Nate can hear the tired smile in his voice.

“All right,” says Nate, and decides not to mention the cold coffee waiting in his car.

“Hey—are you at the airport now?”

“No,” Nate says defensively.

“I can hear security announcements in the back,” says Brad wryly. “You should go home and sleep. It’s too early for this bullshit.”

Yeah, thinks Nate, that seems reasonable. “I’ll do that. But I’ll be there at—” he checks his watch “—twelve, then. Twelve-thirty. If you call me from the gate I think I’ll make it on time.”

“It’s fine.”

“I’ll be there, Brad.”

“I’m serious. I’ll let myself in if you leave me the key while you’re at work. Or I’ll just walk around.”

“If I’ve already taken a day off I might as—” begins Nate, and then freezes.

“You took a day off?” Brad says slowly. “I thought you said you weren’t working today for—okay, I think we’re finally oscar mike. I’ll call upon landing. Stay home.”

“Have a safe flight.”

“Get some sleep. Bye.”

Nate goes to Safeway under the pretenses of buying steaks for dinner, and ends up with a box of cupcakes and a bottle of wine. Thankfully there’s a self-checkout line, and he escapes with the meager dignity left from making the purchase without any witnesses. He’s pretty impressed that you can’t buy alcohol in DC on a Sunday, but you can buy it any other day before eight am. By the time he gets home his shoes are somehow soaked through. He sets the wine on the counter and sinks down on the couch without taking off his scarf. He’s not sure why he thought staying up all night would have helped. Curling his cold feet under him, box of cupcakes on the arm of the sofa, Nate resolves to pick Brad up. He’ll just watch a few episodes of CSI in the meantime.

Nate might as well have resolved to also complete a marathon by twelve-thirty, because he wakes up to knocking on his door. He wakes up slowly, like he’s started to back in the States, and then jumps up so quickly that his vision goes black for a second.

Then the door is open and Brad is there.

“Hey,” says Brad, like it’s the most normal thing in the world to drop by his old buddy Nate Fick’s apartment. If Nate Fick had ever been his buddy, old or otherwise.

“Jesus,” Nate says, wiping his mouth and praying there’s nothing on his face, “I am so sorr—”

“Why are there crumbs on your face?” Well, so much for that.

“I was at Safeway and bought a pack of those mini-cupcakes,” says Nate honestly, but for some reason leaves it at that.

Brad looks at him and finally says, “Thanks for thinking—”

For another reason currently unknown to him, Nate interrupts him and says, “And then I ate all of it.”

“Oh,” says Brad, confused but somewhat amused. Apparently neither of them notices that Brad is still standing in the hallway.

“Jesus Christ, Fick, I’m not your date to the middle school dance. You can say hello like a normal person without braces and bizarre bodily functions.”

Nate laughs and finally they’re hugging, Brad clapping him on the back. Huh, thinks Nate, this is nice. But stilted. They separate and Nate grins, falling back into the easy state of things. “They’re retainers, not Invisalign,” he says over his shoulder, leading Brad through the hallway, “so shut the fuck up when you see them in the bathroom.”

They’re in his living room, and suddenly Nate doesn’t know what to do. His thoughts never got this far. Brad, though, seems to know what he’s doing and throws himself on the couch, sighing blissfully.

“Coach, huh?”

“Of course,” says Brad, stretching his arms out across the top of the loveseat, his fingertips touching the edges.

“Nice wingspan,” says Nate, and immediately realizes that was an incredibly strange thing to think, much less say out loud. Along with that comes the realization that he will probably be asking himself, for the rest of his life, how thoughts like these enter any self-respecting person’s mind.

Thankfully Brad seems to be taking Nate’s oddities in stride today and laughs. Or he thinks Nate was talking about the plane, like he knows anything about planes. Maybe—hopefully—Brad thinks Nate’s just out of it. Briefly Nate considers making up a story about wisdom teeth removal but decides against it in favor of actually hearing Brad’s reply.

“Feels good after sitting with my elbows touching for eight hours. They let you board first, so you can feel uncomfortable for longer. Green weenie perks even off base—it’s why I joined up.”

Nate laughs and says, “Yeah, well, whenever you’re ready, you can just put your stuff in my bedroom.”

“Oh, really, Lieutenant?” says Brad, raising an eyebrow, and Nate snorts. Jesus, though, he thinks, his face is expressive, immediately followed by the fervent hope that Nate’s face is nowhere as telling.

“Don’t count on it, Sergeant. Looks like you’ll have to use the naughty yellow pages tonight after all.”

Brad looks at him and for a terrifying second Nate thinks he’s said the wrong thing, implied the wrong knowledge, that he wasn’t allowed to acknowledge it, or that he didn’t have the privilege of being able to talk about it anymore, or ever—but Brad only waits a second before bursting into laughter.

“Are you serious? ‘Naughty yellow pages’? How many years were you off by in the age you gave to the recruiters, sir? Seven?”

Nate tries so hard not to blush, but he’s not sure it’s something he can control.

“You don’t have to call me that,” Nate says instead, quietly.

“Yeah, I know.”

“Okay.” He clears his throat. “Seriously, though, let me put your stuff in the bedroom.”

Brad smirks but doesn’t move, oddly hesitant. “It’s okay—” he starts, and Nate cuts him off.

“I have a fully functional couch, Brad,” says Nate. “As you have now experienced. I’m not going to make you sleep on it, though, after you went through eight hours of economy hell. Go put your stuff in the bedroom. You’re dripping on the parquet.”

Brad actually laughs at that. “Oh, the _parquet_.”

“Sorry, the hardwood floor.”

“Bullshit. That’s laminate.”

“Whenever you’re finished insulting my humble home, Brad. Take your time.”

 

Nate is drunk. It’s not unexpected. In a brief moment of sobriety, Nate has a flash of clarity. They’re sitting on the bed, eating cold pasta with their fingers. It’s Pizza Hut pasta, but Nate puts the leftovers in a Tupperware container. Nate is not freaking out about it. Yet.

As if reading his mind—but reading it wrong—Brad says, “I always pegged you for a ‘no crumbs in the bed’ kind of guy.”

He wouldn’t have been freaking about the pasta in bed anyway. There is an embarrassingly old sauce stain on the left pant leg of his pajamas, and he shifts a little to cover it up. “Thanks. Any other lasting misconceptions I should know about?”

“I’m also glad you have a TV in your bedroom,” says Brad, sounding relieved.

“Why?” Nate asks suspiciously.

“It’s the American way,” Brad says, completely serious. When Nate looks over, there’s a small smile playing at his lips. “At least you’re not one of those pretentious assholes who act like they don’t watch TV anymore.”

“It was a housewarming gift and it just didn’t fit in the living room.”

“Sure,” says Brad easily. “Can’t replace the large abstract wall art.”

“All right,” Nate allows, “but you’ll notice the lack of feng shui.”

“I won’t.”

“What?”

“I would _not_ notice the lack of feng shui, sir, because I would never have the inclination to look for it in the first place.”

Nate has betrayed himself. “Uh. Oops.”

“You’re transparent as glass, Fick.” He takes the remote from where it’s lying between them. They are conspicuously not touching. Brad seems to be trying to figure out how it works.

“What are you looking for?”

Brad doesn’t answer, just keeps staring at the buttons until he finds what he needs. The recordings schedule shows up on the screen.

“Oh God,” says Nate, mortified.

“TiVo schedules can tell a lot about a person,” says Brad. “We have here…Food Network. CSPAN—CSPAN? Who _plans for_ CSPAN? In advance?”

Nate starts to say something about a scheduled appearance, but Brad cuts his justifications off. “More cooking…I’ve never even heard of this show. I’ve also never heard of you cooking.”

Brad flips back to whatever they were watching and throws the remote farther down the bed. “Yes,” he says thoughtfully, “most of this here has evidenced that this TV is, in fact, owned by a woman. Do you watch normal people television, Fick?”

Nate laughs despite himself. “Leave me alone. We can’t all just be satisfied with reruns of _Top Gun_.”

Brad barks a surprised laugh. “Are you suggesting that’s what you think I watch?”

“That and _Die Hard_ are my best guesses.”

Brad seems to be caught so off-guard by this that he can’t even formulate a response.

“I assume I’ve hit the mark, then,” says Nate smugly.

“No,” recovers Brad, shaking his head, “it’s just that I can’t imagine what kind of sick mind would even project that onto another person.”

“It wasn’t meant to be an insult.”

“Being obsessed with _Die Hard_ is the civilian equivalent of being a motard.”

“Fascinating theory,” deadpans Nate, and Brad kicks him. “And I didn’t say you were obsessed. But all evidence seems to point to the contrary…”

After some half-hearted wrestling, someone—Nate can’t remember which one of them it was—turns out the light, and now they’re lying in bed. On the bed, Nate corrects himself. They’re still on top of the covers.

“I’ve heard you have a fully functional couch,” Brad remarks.

“Yep.”

There’s a silence Nate can’t interpret and even drunk, he raises his head, worried. “Wait—do you—I can sleep there. I wasn’t kidding.”

“I was,” says Brad. “Relax.”

Brad breaks the quiet. “At least it’s not a bunk bed,” he says. “Trust me, I got used to having to make do at Jew camp.”

Nate bursts out laughing. “What the hell is Jew camp?”

Brad sighs heavily and rubs his forehead.  “I shouldn’t have told you. It’s an age-old secret, and here I am, divulging it to a Protestant.”

“I’m Catholic.”

“I’d say ‘same thing,’ but I know your people are touchy about that.”

Nate laughs. “Sounds like you’re deflecting.”

“I am,” comes the deadpan answer.

“It’s not working. Tell me,” demands Nate. “I’m not above actually shoving you off of this bed.”

“It’s a summer camp. For Jews. Jewish summer camp. It’s like band camp, Bible camp, and Hebrew school, all rolled into one, except worse, and with braces. And horseback riding, strangely enough.”

“Oh my God. Please tell me you have photos.”

“My parents wanted me to learn the ways of my people, so they sent me to—” Brad continues stonily, and then seems to register Nate’s comment. “No. You’re not seeing any of that. Or hearing any more about it.”

“Please, tell me what you did at camp. I need to know.”

“Maybe if you could take hints, LT, you’d notice this isn’t something I’m particularly fond of revisiting,” says Brad, but his tone is playful. “Why don’t you tell me what _you_ did at Catholic camp? I’m sure you went.”

Nate shakes his head in the dark, grinning. “Boy Scouts.”

“Shit,” Brad grunts and Nate swears he saw his hand go up to his forehead. “That was so easy, and yet I missed. I was just so caught up on the Catholicism. Of course you were in the Boy Scouts.”

“I’m assuming you weren’t.”

“No,” says Brad. “My parents thought it was a Christian organization and wouldn’t let me go.”

Nate can’t hold in his laughter at the thought of Brad as a Boy Scout, and Brad at camp, and Brad’s parents, whatever they look like, and Brad, generally, as a kid—

“Wait,” he realizes, “that sentence implies you _wanted_ to go.”

“That’s it,” Brad says. “This is enough soul-searching, experience-sharing, touchy-feely bullshit to last me my entire life.”

“I feel special.”

“Good night, LT.”

Nate, who had been slowly getting comfortable and loose enough to fall asleep, freezes when he realizes Brad has been calling him Lieutenant all night. Oh well, he thinks, thankful for the vodka that seems to have made it into his bloodstream despite the dense pasta lining his stomach. He’ll think about that tomorrow. He’s half-asleep when he hears Brad speak.

“You seem okay,” and Brad says it so suddenly and so quietly Nate’s not sure if he should even answer. He does anyway.

“Yeah. Doesn’t mean I don’t need a break, though,” is the most neutral response he can come up with to mumble back. It sounds, to his sleepy brain, vaguely like what he could have said if he was braver. There’s a weird moment that passes too quickly. Nate can’t really register where his limbs are; the weight on the other side of the bed makes it feel like he’s not even in his own home. Brad doesn’t say anything else, though, and Nate falls asleep soon afterward.

 

Nothing happens that night. Or will happen any other night, for that matter, Nate tells himself the next morning, heaving himself off of the bed. The worst part is not that he should be having some kind of panic right now, but that he’s so full and empty at the same time. He doesn’t know what he means by “something happening,” but he knows he wants _something_ to happen. Maybe a fistfight will clear it up. He’ll settle for an arm wrestling match, though.

He gets up to brush his teeth and hopes the water is hot enough to knock him out of it.

They eat breakfast at Denny’s because Nate is nothing if not an excellent and hospitable host. Nothing is said about the bed incident, because it was not an incident, and nothing needs to be said. The fact that they both woke up on top of the covers doesn’t besmirch his innocence either, Nate thinks, and lets it go.

 

“Seeing as I’ve accrued eleven speeding tickets in the last few months,” Brad is saying, “you can be the driver, sir.”

Nate isn’t particularly bothered by Brad’s continued use of sir; he chalks it up to force of habit and both the lack of any acute discomfort in Brad’s use or Nate’s response to it. It seems Brad only calls him sir when Brad’s telling him to do something, but Nate can think about that later. What’s currently eating at him is the fact that Brad calling him Lieutenant. It doesn’t—God forbid—bother him out of any hierarchical considerations. Brad could have called him Private and it would have come out of his mouth sounding respectful. There has to be some other reason, though. He tries to think of the last time he saw Brad. Not at his going away party, that was certain—although Brad knew about the commission, knew about the party. Nate was just never sure why he didn’t attend. Maybe their last meeting was still on base—Nate remembers a handshake and a conversation.

“I’m not going to be here forever,” was the spectacular finish of their only farewell conversation.

“That’s morbid, sir.”

Nate remembers amending his statement, that he didn’t mean it that way, obviously. He meant that maybe they could be friends later. But he guesses that wasn’t on Brad’s mind.

“Sir.”

Nate snaps out of it. They’ve been standing at a green light, albeit in an empty intersection, for a while now, apparently. Brad looks amused.

“Sorry,” says Nate.

“Tired?”

“Distracted. I haven’t driven in a while,” Nate lies.

“Sidetracked by all the pretty sights and sounds, Lieutenant?”

Now it’s distinctly uncomfortable. “Why do you call me that?”

It’s suddenly cold in the car. In his peripheral vision Nate sees Brad sit up. “Does it bother you?” asks Brad, carefully omitting any other address.

“No,” says Nate, and realizes Brad is clever. He’s going to make Nate say it. Fine.

“I know you were busy,” Nate says, and he can’t help the accusatory twinge in his voice, “but you do know I was given a commission?”

“Yes,” says Brad, and Nate’s sure they’re both aware of the sudden chill that’s descended across the center console.

“Well,” and to be honest, Nate’s not sure where he’s going to go with this now. “It’s not that I’m bothered by it, it’s just that—it seems out of character for you.”

That seems to get through. Maybe not in the way Nate had intended, though. “You’re right, sir,” Brad says, and no, this wasn’t what Nate wanted at all— “it’s supremely unprofessional.”

“Brad,” Nate says, quiet and focused on the road, “I don’t care either way. I think I might even prefer you don’t do it, outside of jokes. I just care—I just want to know why.”

“Because I don’t know a Captain Fick,” says Brad, “as unprofessional as that might be.” He tries to turn it into a joke and it falls a little flat. “Let me have my memories.”

“You do now, though.”

“That’s true.”

There’s a silence and it feels tense to Nate.

“I don’t mean anything by it,” he says finally. “I just wanted to know if you did.”

“Maybe I just want to remember Lieutenant Fick.”

Nate knows this sounds ridiculous; that’s why he decides to just go on with it. “I’ll always be Lieutenant Fick, though.” It sounds like he’s calming a child. He feels awkward, especially since this has suddenly turned into third-person references. If Brad starts calling himself “Brad” in this conversation, Nate is leaving.

Nate doesn’t know how Brad can make humming sound skeptical.

“In some small fragment of time, I’m always Lieutenant Fick,” says Nate quietly. “That’s usually what scares me.”

“Which part?”

“That fragment of time, no matter how small.”

Brad opens his mouth and closes it. He seems unsure and Nate is nervous, for some reason. “I think we’re sc—we’re concerned about different things.”

“Brad,” seems to be the only thing Nate can think to say. He keeps his hands on the steering wheel.

“Semantics,” Brad says easily, and when Nate turns to look at him, confused, he says simply: “I don’t want to lose Lieutenant Fick.”

“Sometimes I think I do,” Nate says, and for once, Brad has nothing to say to that, and can’t even meet his eyes. The drive is silent and Nate curses himself for always prying for answers until Brad turns on the radio in a conciliatory gesture, and Nate figures he can beat himself up later. It should worry him that talking about Lieutenant Fick doesn’t even feel like it’s in third person, but he pushes it aside in favor of considering “semantics.” It scares him that there’s still that part of him that’s Lieutenant Fick, stuck in time. Maybe it’s the size of that part of time scares Brad; maybe it’s too small for Brad.

That’s probably not what he means, though, Nate rationalizes, and concentrates on reading road signs.

 

It’s an unexpectedly beautiful drive—the stretch of highway they’re on is surrounded by dense deciduous forests. The leaves are returning; even though it’s already March, spring is creeping in very slowly, and Nate is starting to regret not wearing socks with his loafers. They stop at a random state beach advertising a vista point, and have to wade through knee-high cattails that grab at their jeans to get to the water. It’s beautiful but a little bleak; waves break violently against the shore, but all in all it’s lonely and deserted.

It’s probably illegal, but they start a small fire anyway. Aside from a lighter, a six-pack, and a pack of beef franks, they forget everything else, so they end up using sticks to hold the hotdogs over the fire. They don’t see another soul in the hours that they’re there; no one goes to the shore in March.

Nate sits there and makes a Herculean effort not to acknowledge or think about how astoundingly, unbelievably, extraordinarily happy he is. He doesn’t let himself ask why, either, because he’s afraid he already knows the answer. He’s not sure what frightens him more: if he’s right about what the real answer is or if he’s wrong.

The plastic Hebrew National—it was a calculated joke on Nate’s end—packaging is fluttering under the rock that Nate’s placed on it to keep it from being swept away in the slight wind that’s picked up; the beer has been abandoned for the sake of sober driving and, in Brad’s case, solidarity. Brad is lying on his back, resting his head in his hands, still smiling about the many opportunities for insult that Nate’s Dartmouth pullover has opened.

“Did you read Reporter’s book?” Nate asks, looking over at him.

Brad snorts. “Don’t need to. Ray’s reviews have flooded the e-mail listserve. I can’t anticipate that I have anything to add.”

“I’ll probably buy it.”

“Yeah? How much did you pay Reporter to tell the world you were twenty-four?”

Nate has nothing to retort, so he resorts to violence. Brad has sand in his mouth by the time they surface from the scuffle.

“Seriously, though,” says Nate, rubbing damp sand off of his sweater. “You didn’t read it?”

Brad sighs. “I skimmed it at a Barnes and Noble. You really can’t goad me into discussing its literary merits, Fick. I just looked at the pretty pictures,” he says, and grins.

“Yeah,” Nate says quietly.

“Did _you_ read it?”

“No,” says Nate. “But…I don’t know. I’m not sure if I want that book out there.”

Brad cocks an eye at him. “Well, I’m pretty sure you were aware Reporter was with us. _You_ let him into my vehicle, first of all.”

“I know.”

“Rolling Stone isn’t my choice of magazine, either, but—”

“It’s not that. I don’t know what I’m trying to say. Anyway, I’ll read it and tell you the exciting parts.”

Brad seems relieved. “Let me know if I’m in there,” he says wryly. “I’ll write home.”

“Probably won’t do you any favors if you are, though.”

“It’s already not doing me any favors,” says Brad. “That bullshit is still following me around.”

“What bullshit?”

“The nickname. I overheard some British boots the other day.”

“No doubt whispering in awe. Oooh, Iceman,” says Nate, wiggling his fingers in Brad’s face. “So dreamy! So complex.”

Brad lets out a laugh on his exhale. “I don’t know if it’s because of the book or because of Ray and his insatiable thirst for publicity.”

“Somehow I doubt he’d go to the trouble of notifying completely irrelevant English enlisted about it, though.”

“Person would be heartbroken over your gross underestimation of his dedication, sir,” says Brad, and they lapse into a comfortable silence. Nate watches the lone seagull circle above them. Miraculously, he doesn’t think.

 

After an ill-advised pissing contest to see who could run further into the water, the two of them are shivering and rubbing their legs. Nate’s jeans are soaked from mid-calf down, and Brad is looking no warmer. Unthinking, perhaps spoiled from the peace of leaving his mind so blank earlier, Nate reaches over to rub Brad’s hands between his. He doesn’t notice Brad staring at him, and when Brad pulls away, Nate assumes he’s just getting cold from sitting in that position. Somehow Nate ends up on his elbows in the sand again. It’s a lot harder and colder and less comfortable now. He’s tracing patterns in the sand with a finger, eyes still on the horizon, and then he’s touching Brad’s hand with the same soft, circular motions. Nate’s not sure who moved closer.

“Dinner here?” Nate murmurs. He wouldn’t mind getting some more hot dogs. Maybe eat them in the car; they might be able to get it closer to the sand. He’d risk destroying the cattails for watching the view from heated seats.

Brad clears his throat. “Maybe not.”

“Hmm?”

“Maybe we shouldn’t…be alone.”

That startles Nate. He raises himself up on his elbows to look at Brad. “What?” Instinctively he looks back towards the high brush and trees behind them. Something he hasn’t felt in a long time flares up in him, and Nate has to fight from clenching his fists.

Maybe Brad notices, but he doesn’t say anything. A trace of what could have been a smile appears at the edges of his mouth, and passes quickly.

Nate licks his lips and moves to sit up slowly. “Why?” he mutters, keeping his voice low. His hand automatically goes out to scrabble in the sand beside him, feeling for something he knows he didn’t put there but that should be there anyway, like a phantom limb. He can feel movement, human activity, presence, behind their backs now. He’s not sure how he didn’t notice it before. He blinks at the ocean, which seems to have stopped moving. The waves are frozen, although all he hears is their roar. Fuck. He wants to move quickly, but it’s a different kind of fear. They don’t know he and Brad are there.

There’s a hand on his shoulder and Nate reacts. Two seconds later, he’s still on top of Brad, blood pounding in his ears, but the roar gone.

“Jesus,” says Brad hoarsely, the wind knocked out of him. Nate can tell he’s refraining from shouting at him. For some reason Nate has thrown himself across his chest. “What the hell is—what’s going on?”

“What?” Nate says, and it comes out as a hoarse yell.

“What are you doing?”

“Why the hell would you tell me there was someone there?” Nate says, voice rising. He whips around to scan the brush behind them. It’s as still as it was before, swaying softly. There’s no one there, no one in the few trees. No one on the beach. “What the fuck is your problem?”

Brad is staring at him like he’s grown a third head, never mind a second.

Nate is angry. He feels bile rising up in his throat and he’s halfway on his feet when Brad’s hand closes around his wrist. He tries to shake it off and ends up pulling Brad along with him. Brad is toeing on his shoes, but not taking his eyes off of Nate’s face. Brad is angry too, and Nate can’t fucking imagine why.

“Why the fuck would you say that?”

“I’m going to ask you again,” says Brad, “what the fuck are you talking about?”

“’We’re not alone?’ What the fuck is that bullshit?”

“What?” Brad says slowly, dangerously. “I never fucking said that.”

“Yes, you fucking did.”

“I told you that maybe we shouldn’t be alone.”

“Yeah?” screams Nate. He’s not sure when his voice got to this pitch, but he’s beyond caring about parsing out the sequence of events. “Then what the fuck does that mean? ‘We shouldn’t be alone?’ The only reason we shouldn’t be alone is if someone’s fucking there with us and we don’t have—”

Nate says “cover” at the same time that Brad finishes for him: “Our rifles?”

If it were true, Nate thinks, then he wouldn’t be angry anymore. He’d deflate and accept Brad’s position. But he’s still angry, and he’s getting angrier, and it’s not getting any truer.

“Fuck you, Brad,” he spits at him.

Brad is looking at him with an expression Nate can’t recognize. Is it bewilderment? Nate would be dumbfounded too, if he were stupid enough to say something to elicit this from Nate.

He realizes with a sick feeling that it’s pity.

“What’s going on, Nate?” Brad says, much more quietly.

No, thinks Nate. This is not how this was supposed to go. This is not how it should be; this is not how he wanted his name, his real name, not his official address or comradely surname, to come out of Brad’s mouth for the first time.

“I don’t know,” he says, shaking off the hand that’s still on his arm. “I have literally never done this before.”

And the truth is, he really hasn’t. He doesn’t even know what he’d thought Brad’s hand on his shoulder was. He had come home and besides the fact that everyone else was watching him for it, he was watching for the signs. No particular mood swings—bank fraud and secretarial incompetence aside—no troubling thoughts, not the kind that lead to something dangerous, at least. No hallucinations, no flashbacks, no need for medication. Occasionally, when he gets stressed, Nate still can’t look at anything directly, can’t give the landscape a quick survey like normal people do—sometimes his eyes dart wildly all over the place—but that’s pretty much to be expected. He’s not the Iceman, after all. Self-therapy and self-adjustment were working just fine for him. He knows how to take care of himself and any unexpected and unpleasant side effects that can pop up but haven’t. He doesn’t know why suddenly Brad’s presence messes him up. He reassures himself that it won’t happen again, but he’s worried that it happened in the first place. Brad is not helping, he thinks. Brad is not helping with whatever Nate mistakenly hoped he could help with.

Brad might be making things worse.

 

Nate doesn’t stop fuming, but the rage lessens in intensity by the time Nate realizes that he’s sitting in the frigid car, barefoot. His loafers are still somewhere on the beach. The floor carpets are cold and rough against his feet; he should’ve worn socks.

Eventually Brad comes back to the car, too, and wordlessly drops Nate’s shoes outside his side of the car. Obviously there’s silence. It looms between them like an abyss, and Nate can’t help but want to kick pebbles into it. He refrains, though, and Brad regresses into the bullshit nickname he had so recently rejected.

It’s dark by the time they pull out onto the main highway. Nate hadn’t planned for this; or maybe he had, but they were useless fantasies, long abandoned. Now he just wants to get home and sleep on his sofa. He has never, in his entire life, longed for the comforts of a couch this much. At one point in the drive back, Brad’s face and figure completely obscured by shadow in the passenger seat, Nate realizes that they need to stop for the night. Nate hasn’t lost his way, but it’s bound to happen soon. He considers pulling off of the road at the nearest fluorescent billboard.

Nate is still angry, but now he doesn’t want to let go of Brad. He knows there will be separate beds in the hotel room, and he’s not stupid enough to try to get a queen and tell Brad it was the only one they had. He hates Brad, right now, but he doesn’t want him to be anywhere that’s not immediately close.

So Nate stubbornly refuses the hotel. Brad is probably asleep at this point, and isn’t offering resistance. An indeterminable amount of time later—it could have been minutes, it could have been an hour—Nate feels his eyes closing. He swerves gently off of the road, and his fingers scarcely take the keys out of the ignition before he’s asleep.

 

He wakes up and feels like his bladder is going to explode. The feeling is only exacerbated when he realizes with a start that, for some reason, he’s in his car—and that Brad’s not there.

Apparently, though, Brad had the same problem, as Nate spots him coming back towards the car, zipping his fly. Nate gets out of the car and sidesteps him to find some tree he can relieve himself behind so he doesn’t look like a frat guy on a road trip.

The tension has somewhat abated by the time Nate pulls into the familiar parking lot of a Dunkin. They order—and Nate will only later realize that he still has no idea what kind of coffee Brad drinks—and slide into a booth to sit across from each other.

“Anyway,” says Nate, apropos of nothing. He feels hungover, even though he knows he’s not.

“Anyway,” echoes Brad, sipping his coffee.

There’s a stubborn reticence between them, and then Brad makes a decision.

“Wanna get in a political argument? I’ll let you believe you have a chance at winning.”

Nate laughs and figures Rush Limbaugh is as good a topic as any to smooth things over. He’s not sure any other person has ever said that before, but he’ll take it.

 

They’re at the airport again; this time Nate manages to be awake enough to get them both to Reagan National. They’re getting Brad’s bag out from the trunk, and Nate can’t help but feel like something bigger happened. Something else, something more or instead of what actually took place—which was, if he thought about it objectively and took into account Brad’s point of view, nothing. Maybe a temper tantrum on Nate’s part, embarrassing, but nothing too spectacular. A little part of him is glad that is was nothing, that Nate didn’t let it come to something bigger.

He does.

Brad’s hand is on the trunk door and he slams it shut. Nate’s hands are on his face and they’re kissing.

Or, rather, Nate is kissing Brad.

If Nate had ever imagined it, it would have been a lot less…awkward. It would have went a lot smoother, a lot more subtly; maybe, out of habit, Nate or Brad would have leaned across the gear shift and pressed a kiss goodbye to the other’s cheek. Maybe the lips. Then they would go their separate ways and pretend it never happened.

This, though, is going to be significantly harder to wish away, because even though Nate knows his own lips are moving, he realizes after a few excruciating seconds that Brad is very, very still.

Nate pulls back. He has never been this scared in his entire life, which is a sweeping statement he makes in full confidence. His legs might be shaking. Brad’s hand is still on the trunk, which apparently he hadn’t slammed shut because it rises up when Brad lifts his hand.

Nate is just thankful that Brad doesn’t look around to see if anyone saw; he just leaves. Nate doesn’t follow him, because he is not that stupid.

Nate gets in the car and sits there for a little while, processing and assessing the damage. His brain isn’t quite working, though, and he doesn’t know if he has the mental or physical strength to start justifying things to himself right now—or worse: projecting consequences. He turns on the engine, but before he can start pulling out of the parking space he notices his trunk is still hanging open and that there’s a hand pulling open the passenger side door.

Brad doesn’t even get in as much as he seems to hover over the seat. He reaches across the console and kisses Nate so hard he has to splay his fingers across Nate’s cheeks to keep himself from pressing Nate against the window.

Nate knows that this is not the way to fix this, and Brad must know it too, because when he pulls away Nate’s face is wet, and Nate knows that he’s not the one crying.

 

Nate drives home and falls asleep on his couch. When he wakes with a pounding headache, all he can do is hobble over to his bedroom to retrieve his pillow and duvet before returning to the couch and passing out again.

: : :

Nate feels pretty safe in assuming the finality of that end.

But Brad calls, and Nate finds himself relieved at having his expectations—he’s careful not say hopes—fulfilled. He had them in the first place because he knew, in some way, that Brad wasn’t the type to abandon hopeless situations. Mostly Nate spent the past few days returning to the thought of Brad visiting his ex-fiance’s house. It’s nice having friends, echoes Nate, and isn’t sure where he heard that before.

“Hi,” says Brad and is apparently content to leave it at that for several seconds.

“Listen—” begins Nate, because he’s pretty sure this is how all conversations of this ilk are supposed to go. His experience with this being, of course, what he’s seen in movies.

Brad picks up his cue seamlessly. “I didn’t—”

“Okay,” Nate says, and prays that this conversation is officially over. Either that or that now there would be some explosive drama scene, and that his telephone blows up and he and Brad never have any reason to think about each other again.

Brad doesn’t help him out with this fantasy. “I never,” he says, and seems to start and stop a few times before he finishes it. “I never wanted…that.”

Nate wants to ask what _that_ means, or, if it’s what he’s thinking of, if Brad didn’t want _that_ or if he just didn’t want to _do_ _that_. Instead he asks: “Is that what you’ve been thinking all along?”

“Yes,” says Brad. Nate knows that the unsteadiness he hears in Brad’s voice is his own wishful thinking.

“Are you sure?” Nate says, and then, feeling brave and unbelievably stupid, adds: “I was,” like he thinks it could salvage the situation and turn it around 180 degrees. He realizes too late that he probably should have been thinking of that as an “or” situation rather than as an “and” scenario.

Nate is also quick to realize that both were pipe dreams, and hastily adds: “But I’m not going to make you lie to me.”

“So then don’t lie to me!” Brad snaps unexpectedly, and Nate lets the panicked smile he didn’t know he was wearing slide off of his face.

“Listen,” says Brad, “and I’m only going to say this once, and only because we’re friends. Do you know where I am? I’m sitting on base, like I do every other day. I’m not exactly counting on deployment. I mean, I am, but...this is a training assignment.”

Abruptly, he seems to change tack. “You left for your own reasons that I, contrary to popular belief, might actually be able to understand. You weren’t abandoning anyone if that’s what is, for some reason, going through your mind. And more importantly, I don’t think you know exactly what you’re talking about when you talk about leaving. What did you, or do you, think you were leaving? The armed forces? The culture of the Corps? The warrior class?” he said, and Nate can hear the smirk in his words. “I think you knew exactly what you were leaving for, Nate, but not what you were leaving behind. There’s still a reason there. Maybe you should think about it and get back to me.”

Nate says nothing. This sounds like a break-up, and then he corrects himself: what the hell is he even thinking? What break-up?

“Okay?”

Nate comes back to the voice on the phone. “Yeah,” he says. “Okay.”

“Good night.”

“Take care, Brad.” He leaves out the unspoken “thanks” and lets it linger in his head after Brad hangs up.

It sounds suspiciously like a valediction and Brad, as always, sounds way more in control of the situation than Nate is. Nate curses himself and takes his Nyquil.

 

Things stay a little neutral after that. Nate gives Brad credit, though, and realizes that he was wrong to assume that Brad would stop calling. The conversations start feeling like conversations with his mom, though. Even their banter is bland, although Nate cuts them some slack; it’s kind of difficult to find witty things to say about supermarket items and the one other subject that Nate can think of that doesn’t have to deal with the military or human emotion. He can’t remember what that subject is, but it might have to do with the relative merits of various cleaning supplies.

: : :

Nate gets brave. Actually, he gets drunk, but he figures it’s the same thing since the panic he’s feeling as he dials Brad’s number is more subdued than usual.

“Brad?”

“Who else would it be?”

“Uh, disclaimer before we talk: I’m very drunk.”

Brad gives a low laugh. “That’s a first.”

“I’m…actually quite drunker than I thought I was at the beginning of this phone call idea. I’m just warning you.”

“Duly noted, sir.”

Shit. Nate can’t interpret that “sir.” After the events of last month he’s not sure if he can ever take it as a playful jab again. This might actually be Brad trying at distanced civility.

“I’m serious, Brad.”

“Okay.”

“This is pretty much me advising you to hang up before I embarrass myself. And you, for listening to me.”

There’s another laugh. “Would you believe there is absolutely nothing else I’d rather be doing right now?”

Nate’s heart skips a beat. He can think these poetic thoughts because he’s drunk, he reasons.

“Nothing else I’d _be_ doing,” Brad nonchalantly corrects himself. “I’m stuck inside because, as always, it is raining.”

That shatters a bit of Nate’s poetic thoughts. “Oh.”

“Anything else, or did you just want to prove to someone that you were old enough to legally purchase alcohol?”

“Why were you so open to friendship?” Nate blurts out.

“Okay,” says Brad slowly, “not where I thought this was going to go.”

Nate barrels on, unable to stop himself. Maybe if he gets it out now he will never feel the need to do this again. “I… it’s not like I looked to anyone else for it, before or after, I’m just thinking…why me? Why did you feel comfortable enough now—or, I guess, just before now—when you didn’t in Iraq?”

Brad sighs. “I _did_ feel comfortable in Iraq.”

He doesn’t say anything else, and Nate thinks that’s the curtain falling. But he waits long enough that his heart jumps when Brad eventually continues. “That was the problem. I felt too comfortable. I tried to forget about it, but…if you called, I was going to answer. So I did.”

“Thanks,” says Nate. He hopes Brad can hear the aching sincerity in his voice. He just wants it out of his throat, where it’s currently hurting him.

“And I will.”

“Thanks,” whispers Nate. He’s a little close to tears and he blames vodka.

“Pretty much every time,” Brad says and gives a pitiful chuckle.

“Thank you.” Nate is never drinking vodka again.

“Glad you’re my friend,” Brad mutters, and Nate doesn’t even say thank you this time, because Nate accidentally hangs up.

It probably wasn’t an accident, given that he wakes up with puffy eyes and a sore throat.

 

Nate should be happy at what was a heartfelt admission of concern and friendship, but he isn’t. He feels more miserable than he has in months, especially because this time doesn’t hear from Brad for a long time. Nate knows the ball is in his court now; if he called, Brad would answer. But he doesn’t call, so Brad doesn’t answer.

: : :

“Wanna go to France?”

Nate removes a headphone from his ear. “What?”

“Sorry, let me rephrase that,” Rick says. “Are you interested in broadening your intellectual horizons and representing the company at an international symposium located in Europe?”

“Are you serious?”

“Hurry up and decide before I reconsider and offer the ticket to Jenny in payroll.”

“You wouldn’t do that.”

“I would.”

“You wouldn’t, because then you’d have to buy another ticket for her boyfriend.” Nate grins. “Considering he’s probably about 400 pounds of muscle, you might have to even buy two.”

“Fuck you, Fick, I’m taking Levins.”

“No, no!” wails Nate, catching his sleeve. Rick snatches his arm away and the force leaves Nate spinning in his chair. “I’ll do it!” he calls after him, down the row of cubicles. “I’ll do it!”

“Yeah, we’ll see!”

Rick finds Nate in the cafeteria. Nate puts down his fork.

“Are you serious, though?” he says. “I need to know before I get my hopes up and consequently dashed.”

Rick flashes him a smile and produces the printed e-mail confirmation from his pocket. “Read it and weep.”

Nate stares at him open-mouthed. He’s been halfway across the world before, he’s not quite sure why he’s so awed by this ticket to France.

“Take me with you,” he whispers. “I’m sorry for appearing so ungrateful before. I was just shocked by your benevolence.”

“Business class,” sings Rick, waving the ticket in front of his eyes.

Nate doesn’t even ask about the dates; he’s sold. Nate knows what he’s doing before his brain even fully forms the idea.

 

They’re rolling their laptop cases—God, this is a change—through Reagan National when Nate asks again: “Explain to me, for the hundredth time, why they decided to send you to France? And how the hell am I here?”

“Well,” says Rick indulgently, “we always show up at this convention. It’s some international security thing they like, cooperation among nations, innovations, technology, corporate culture, other buzzwords. It’s kind of a big deal.”

“Apparently not, if they’re sending you.”

Rick ignores him. “They usually get one guy from sales or logistics and one guy from the department to go. This year, I’m that one guy.”

“Because all the other guys were busy, sick, or kidnapped?”

“Pretty much.”

“And I’m your page, right?” says Nate, grinning.

“You’re catching on, Fick, and it only took you half a year.”

If anyone had bothered to look closer at Nate, though, they would have noticed something a little off. The smile was a little frightened, because Nate had already started cataloging all of the different bad decisions that would be available for him to choose from and make in just ten short hours.

 

He and Rick are carefully lying flat on their respective beds in an effort not to wrinkle their suits before the big conference dinner.

“I’m going to make an embarrassing phone call,” Nate decides.

Rick waves his hand.

“It has serious potential to get ugly,” he warns. No further response from Rick. “Very ugly.”

“You wanna call your ex-wife, that’s your problem. I’m just along for the ride.”

Nate’s finger is on the last digit of Brad’s number when Rick jumps up. “Shit!” he says. “What time is it?”

“It’s six ten,” says Nate. “Relax. The dinner is at seven.”

“Yeah, but the car’s supposed to be downstairs at six!”

Nate’s cell phone is abandoned in the hotel room, along with Nate’s tie. He comes back for the tie, and shoves the phone under his pillow. It’s generally forgotten there, or in various coat pockets, over the following days.

: : :

Regardless of the questionable prudence of the idea itself, what was certain was that it was supposed to have been a surprise, potentially at Brad’s doorstep. The idea didn’t get that far.

Nate is leaning his forehead against—actually making contact with—the airport toilet seat when Brad picks up the phone.

“Hello?”

“Brad,” Nate groans.

“What’s going on?”

“For the love of God, please come get me.”

“What are you talking about? Where are you?”

“I’m in stall four—no, five—of the Heathrow International Airport Concourse C men’s restroom. I am requesting immediate backup.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I was in France. Now I’m in England. French food has wreaked havoc upon my stomach, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to have to end this call here because I feel my organs rising up through my esophagus again—I just—Brad, please come help me.” Nate is surprised he could be so eloquent while suppressing the enormous urge to start retching again. He reaches a feeble hand to press the flush button. He knows his grip is weak right now, he just doesn’t realize that his grip is also responsible for an extremely important piece of technology at the moment.

He spends the next few seconds watching the water churn around his now useless cell phone.

 

Nate is just giving up on all hope of being discovered by anyone besides the midnight cleaning crew and mentally patting himself on the back for being able to find humor in such dark times when there is a thunderous pounding on the door of his stall.

He pulls himself up a little farther against the wall and reaches up to unlock the door.

Brad Colbert, in uniform, is glaring down upon him.

“Thank Christ,” is all Nate can say. “I don’t know how you found me, but thank you. Thank you.”

“You give pretty good directions for someone who sounds like they’re underwater. Oh, and stuck in a public restroom in a foreign country at two in the afternoon.”

Brad shoves the keys he’s holding into the pocket of his cammies and holds out a hand to Nate.

“I’m so past embarrassment I don’t even know if what I’m experiencing at this point is real,” Nate says, taking his hand. “I might be a little delirious.”

“You sound pretty cognizant.”

“If by that you mean that you’re surprised that I’m speaking without spewing, then I can tell you definitively that there is nothing left to throw up.”

“Now I’m uncomfortable,” says Brad, still standing in the doorway.

“Sorry,” says Nate, pulling himself up.

 

They’re halfway to Brad’s car when Nate remembers. “Also, I think I may be missing my luggage.”

Brad stops specifically to heave an enormous sigh. He turns back to Nate. “Sir, I hate you.”

“Brad, you have gone above and beyond the call of duty.”

“I am painfully aware.”

“Good. And I would appreciate it if you would accompany your former commanding officer so that he may retrieve his sad luggage from the carousel. Your presence is requested because said commanding officer is pretty certain of nausea occurring when he sees the spinning metal.”

Once they’re in the taxi, however, Nate sobers up. “Brad,” he says, “I am so sorry. I seriously hope I didn’t take you out of—”

“You didn’t,” Brad interrupts.

“I have a hotel reservation,” Nate says quickly. “Let me just pull up the address.”

“You do?” Brad asks, raising an eyebrow.

Nate pauses for a second too long, and the look Brad gives him prevents him from lying. “No,” he admits. “But only out of poor planning, not out of—uh, hope, or anything like that.”

To his surprise, Brad laughs. “I’ve got a fully functional couch,” and Nate smiles even as he desperately quashes the expectations attached to that phrase.

 

He’s thankful he attained some measure of self-control in the taxi, however, because Brad makes it clear that Nate will be experiencing the comforts of said fully functional couch. Brad’s not impolite by any means—he’s no Suzy Homemaker, but he gives Nate sheets, a pillow, a blanket, and shows him where everything is in the bathroom. Nate hears the quiet click of Brad’s bedroom door shutting from where he’s standing in the bathroom, brushing his teeth. He spits out the toothpaste and turns off the water. If he pauses by Brad’s door for a second too long, he doesn’t let himself think about it.

There’s a glass of water and an Alka-Seltzer tablet waiting for him on the coffee table.

 

Nate wakes up to an empty apartment, no note, and the burning desire to explain to Brad what exactly he is doing in England. There are, however, keys on the table that make it pretty clear that Nate is allowed to leave the flat. To his surprise, he does. He feels well enough to put on a sweater—in _July_ —and walk around just long enough to wonder how he’s going to explain this all away. He sits down on a bench with a bag of fish and chips because he knows Brad would kill him if he suggested they participate in such tourist activities, and he feels like he should get something in on this amazing flop of a trip.

By the time Nate finds his way back to the flat, however, Brad is waiting for him with two steaming bags of cod and potatoes. For a few hours, Nate feels as though the past few months have fallen away, and he can just convince himself that it’s just Brad Colbert and his old buddy, Nate Fick, who just might be getting closer to that title. The illusion of that past is somewhat shattered by a feeling Nate isn’t sure was there before, that he hasn’t felt in a long time because he attributed that same self-destructive emotion to whatever he felt during the incident in the car. He’s done so well at quashing it that the memory has gained the strange quality of fantasy now, although he can’t quite convince himself that it really never happened.

 

That night, Brad comes to sit by him on the couch. They watch a little TV, and Nate feels Brad’s hand come to brush up against his, but when he looks at Brad he doesn’t see anything. It’s just Brad sitting on the couch in shorts and a t-shirt. Nate inches away and Brad leaves a few minutes later. Nate doesn’t understand it any more than Brad does.

He sits there for a little while, barely listening to the accents of the British newscasters. He’s about to turn off the TV when he hears something so soft, so hesitant, that he’s sure there’s no way it could have come from Brad.

“Hey…”

It’s not his name or anything as obvious; but the sound trails off and lingers and seems to reverberate off the walls.

Nate knocks softly on the bedroom door and enters without any reply from Brad, who’s just sitting on the bed, rubbing his face.

Nate still doesn’t understand it, but hope seems to transition into certainty, and Nate knows what’s going to happen next, knows it like he knows the sun will rise in the morning.

It’s tentative, close-mouthed, but they separate quickly and Nate finds Brad gesturing vaguely downwards. Nate looks down, and then back up at Brad, inching closer to him, back to his mouth.

“I’m not…I’m not doing….that,” Brad says, and that was not what Nate was expecting.

“Okay,” says Nate. He hasn’t felt this uncomfortable about the workings of his own body since high school, and he’s spent the last decade completely content not to revisit that time.

“Uh,” says Brad, and seems like he’s going to say something else.

“That’s fine,” breathes Nate, and realizes he has no idea where he was going with this.

A considerable amount of time passes and Nate finally thinks it’s all right to move closer, to move back into Brad’s lips. Brad responds at first, but as soon as he feels Nate’s weight shift on the mattress he breaks away.

“Nothing with my mouth,” he mutters, looking down.

“Yeah, I fucking got it, Brad,” he says, rolling over. Jesus, this is awful, he thinks, and when he gets up to go to the couch Brad doesn’t stop him.

Nate spends the hour before falling asleep listening to the silence and wishing that Brad would have.

 

The next night, though, they have alcohol, and Brad comes back from base in his uniform. There’s a heat in Nate’s belly and a buzzing in his mind that he knows started way before vodka was even mentioned.

Okay, maybe Brad will never ask. As far as Nate can tell, he can barely agree. But Nate can do this. Nate can offer.

They’re looking at each other and Nate remembers this from college—he remembers the same caution, the same longing… With it comes a flood of memories. He’s kissing Brad, their lips are moving against each other, and Nate has suddenly unleashed things he hasn’t thought about in a long time, not because he had banished them from his mind, but because there simply wasn’t any occasion.

They break apart. Unconsciously Nate wipes his mouth.

Maybe Brad noticed. “I—”

They’re kissing again. Brad’s hand are on his face, and when Nate opens his eyes for a fraction of a second, he has never seen Brad as concentrated as this.

Instinctively, Brad’s hands move to unbutton his own cammies, and for some reason Nate reaches out a hand to stop him. Brad’s eyebrows knit for a second, eyes closed, and then he opens his eyes and pulls away.

Nate pushes forward. “Don’t,” he breathes, and simply moves closer. Brad doesn’t saying anything, and then Nate’s hand is on his crotch, rubbing through the material. Brad moans. He makes another try to unfasten his pants, but Nate stops him and Brad seems to understand what he’s doing, even if Nate himself doesn’t. It’s all right, he tells himself, it’s over the clothes—it’s barely explicit. He doesn’t acknowledge the fact that his thoughts, unlike his actions, are wholly sexual, and that the erection straining his own pants isn’t bothering him—psychologically, that is—in the least. But he keeps telling himself that this way it’s not as—not as—

Brad’s hand slides through his hair, cups the back of his neck. Nate hears himself moan, feels it come up through his throat and into Brad’s mouth, and he is legitimately surprised to only find his tongue in Brad’s mouth now. Brad grabs him and holds on, and it’s a little difficult to breathe with Brad holding him in place and sucking the air out of his lungs but Nate holds on, too. He buries his face in Brad’s neck and finally Brad seems to agree with him—the palm that Nate’s rubbing up against Brad isn’t anywhere near enough, and Brad hauls him up onto his lap. Nate almost falls through Brad’s spread legs, but eventually he’s on top of Brad and, Jesus, he feels the rough material he hasn’t felt in a long time.

He doesn’t care what it makes him look like; Nate pries a hand off of Brad to unzip his fly, push his pants and boxers down at least low enough to get his cock out, and when he starts rubbing up against the fabric of Brad’s cammies, he feels like he no longer needs to see Brad’s face. This is Brad, he knows; he knows when his face is in the crook of Brad’s neck, when he’s rising up and down on Brad, grinding their erections together, Brad’s still clothed. But he feels Brad trying to buck his head up from his shoulder, and Nate shifts to look at him. Nate throws his arms around Brad’s shoulders and rises up enough to drag his cock up Brad’s front, and when he comes all he sees is a freeze frame of what looks like disappointment on Brad’s face.

 

Nate wakes up to a phone call from Rick, and creeps from the room to answer it.

“You back in the States?” Nate asks.

“Yeah. How’s the friend?”

Nate pauses to look back towards the bed. “Uh. Great. Really…supportive,” is the adjective he eventually comes up with.

When he hangs up and promises to update his Outlook calendar, he stands in the doorway, wondering whether he should get back in the bed and watching Brad’s chest rise and fall. “How’s the friend?” Rick’s voice rings in his ears.

Nate hasn’t thought about anyone like he’s doing now for so long he doesn’t even remember what to do with the information. What exactly is it that you do in relationships that you don’t do in friendship, besides the one obvious thing? Is it just that, then, that distinguishes the two? What do you do when the novelty wears off?

Nate looks at Brad’s sleeping form. He’s sprawled out on his back, mouth slightly ajar. His arm is thrown across his chest, as though paused mid-scratch; somehow the moonlight reflects off of his chest, caught in the sparse golden hair there.

Nate thought that maybe he was just drawn to their conversations, the comfort of a look passing between them. He’s never been afraid to admit to loneliness. But Brad’s eyes are closed now and the only noise he’s making is soft snuffling, not quite snores. Nate is not sure he’s too brave in admitting to other things.

He has needs, but that’s not what he’s thinking of now. The novelty of Brad Colbert has, superficially, worn off a long time ago. There are still some things he doesn’t know about him and might not ever know, no matter how far things go; but that’s not really novelty. Nate feels like he knows him, that he knew him in Iraq and that knowing him here isn’t that much different—that Brad Colbert, who is apt to be in three places in the world at once on any given day, feels like the only constant Nate has, might ever have, in his life. Maybe that’s why he’s looking at Brad move a little in his sleep, and isn’t thinking any thoughts besides ones he hasn’t felt in a long time.

If Nate was braver, he thinks, or even if he had ever touched another male body besides his own, he would have offered anyway, would have touched Brad the way he really wanted to and maybe Brad wouldn’t have pulled away. Nate just wants to make that distinction for himself—that there’s nothing else stopping him, no self-respect issues tied up with being totally okay that Brad’s not fully reciproacting. It’s just Brad, physically, that’s stopping him. Nate figures that’s a pretty big admission to make to himself, and carefully gets into the bed.

 

At the airport, Brad specifically goes out of his way to wear sweatpants, uncharacteristically sloppy, especially when Nate knows that he has to report in just a few hours. It would have been more convenient for him to just drop Nate off in uniform.

Brad makes a weird comment, seemingly apropos of nothing. “Miss the uniform?”

Nate doesn’t say anything. He’s met with an outstretched hand when he finds himself standing closer to Brad than he thought he was. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting, so he accepts the handshake and hears his boarding group being called.

Nate leaves England feeling like a satisfied teenager. He doesn’t notice that itself is a problem until he’s back in the States, and then a problem with his luggage makes him forget about the little niggling feeling anyway.

: : :

"Nate...what do you want out of this?"

Nate doesn't understand why Brad is doing this now, on the phone. Generally Nate doesn't understand most things at four in the morning, but he does what he can. He tries to sit up but doesn't really manage it and ends up on his elbow, blinking in the dark.

"Same thing as you," he says cautiously.

"What do you think I want?"

"I..." Fuck, it's four am and, he realizes, there's no other reason Brad would be calling knowing this. "Brad, I'm waiting for you," he says. “Or, uh, for the next time we see each other.”

There's silence on the other end of the line. "Brad?"

Still nothing. Shit. "Brad—I love you."

Oh, _fuck_. He’s still half-asleep and even in the dream it seems like a bad idea. But he says it again because he hears breathing and Brad needs this. Actually, he doesn't think he'll ever know what Brad needs, but he does it anyway.

“I love you."

It feels out of character the moment he repeats it without the qualifying “Brad” in the beginning, but he can’t do anything about it now. He wanted to say something else, but that would do, he guesses. He’s actually pretty convincing for four am. Jesus, he misses Brad, feels like he's missing, even though Nate can count the four ams they've shared on one hand. Half of one hand.

Maybe he's just imagining it when Brad's voice cracks on the first syllable of his sentence, and then what follows confirms he definitely thinks he's imagining the whole scene.

"I...we're never going to have this."

"What?" There's static. "What the hell are you talking about? Brad, where are you?"

He just catches the end of Brad's response: "—not what I want."

He's not going to say anything. He's not going to say anything because he's not sure he heard that, and he's not going to say anything until he blinks really hard and wakes up with drymouth. 

"Nate?"

Nate's still not sure what to say, so Brad hangs up.

Nate keeps pressing the red button he's blearily looking at, and it feels good in a dead-end way. Ha, he thinks. I got the last word, and he falls asleep again, an arm hanging over the side of the bed.

 

When he wakes up two hours later, he doesn't remember anything until he's rounding up another 5% of his paycheck that's spent on coffee. As the barista asks him for his order, he freezes. Did he hallucinate? Where was he last night? He couldn't have imagined the entire scene without help—

"Sir?"

"Uh, yeah," says Nate. "Sorry." He gives her his credit card.

Apparently not good enough, because that's his ID. "You haven't ordered yet. Our pumpkin spice latte is back,” she adds.

Jesus. "Medium Americano, please. Sorry about that," and after he pays he steps aside.

He realizes he’s been standing there for a while when an annoyed voice pierces his thoughts.

“Brad!” says the aggravated barista, for what seems to be a third time. Jesus, thinks Nate, what a sick coincidence. The universe always has time to play a sad cosmic joke on unsuspecting Nate Fick.  No one seems to be coming forward for it, though. Good. Maybe all the Brads have disappeared from the Earth.

“Medium Americano for Brad!”

Oh shit. That’s his order. He looks around a few more times and finally comes to terms with the fact that that was the name that probably slipped out. He slinks up to the counter to claim his drink as quickly as possible.

“Thanks,” he says, smiling apologetically.

“Sure, Brad,” says the barista, face softening. “Have a good day.”

“Unlikely,” mutters Nate, “but thanks.”

 

He gets into the office barely on time and doesn’t even take off his coat. The only thing going through his mind is different variations on the same theme: _what_? He’s still sitting on the now wet, snow encrusted felt with untouched coffee in his hand, getting into the _what the hell_ stage of things and staving off the inevitable _oh God_ part, when Rick comes by.

“Hey,” he says, mouth full of donut, “d’you hear about—Jesus Christ, Nate, are you okay?”

Nate snaps out of it. He sorely needs the reassurance that he doesn’t look that bad, but he’ll wait until he can splash water on his face in the bathroom and give himself a mirror pep talk there.

“Did you just get in?” Rick asks, looking at his watch. “It’s like nine-thirty. Are you cold or something?”

Nate immediately gets up and starts disentangling himself from his coat. “I had a rough morning.”

“Yeah, I can tell. What’s up?”

“I honestly couldn’t tell you,” Nate says, hanging his coat on the back of his chair and rubbing his cold hands together.

“Oh.” There’s a disappointed look on his face. Nate can’t bring himself to care all that much.

“Not like that—I just…I don’t know. Did I go home last night?”

Rick looks concerned.

“I’m making this sound crazy. It’s not. I just got a weird…phone call.”

“I’m telling you,” says Rick knowingly, shaking his head, “women are crazy. Like, certifiably crazy.”

Nate has no appropriate response, so he doesn’t make any.

He spends his day up to lunch twirling a pen between his fingers and trying to divine some meaning from the time at which Brad called, incidentally the only tangible proof he has that the entire scene even happened.

: : :

Nate goes to a different bar when the one he’s been at since ten pm closes. This one is apparently "Irish" and advertises itself as a 23-hours a day bar. It opens at six am. He really doesn't want to be here to see who comes in for a drink at six in the morning, so he plans on this being his last drink. "I'm not that bad," he says to the bartender. He is actually surprised these things happen outside of the movies.

The bartender nods and moves away sympathetically, but he has to return to polish the glasses, and that's when Nate starts up again. "I—I'm not that bad."

"Sure, buddy. Want a drink?"

Nate isn't sure whether this is good business or just enabling. He decides it's both, and fishes out his credit card out of his pocket to give to the bartender. By some stroke of fate, he ends up taking out the base ID he hasn’t been able to find since San Diego. Somehow, it ended up in these pants and now it’s on the table, his picture looking up at him and the bartender. The photograph makes him look twelve and potentially high.

The bartender looks up at him. Nate realizes he's a complete and total asshole only after the words leave his mouth. "Don't worry, I don't have fucking PTSD or whatever else you're thinking about right now.” He's really channeling his inner angry Brad right now. Fuck. 

"I'm not, man."

"Unless you can get PTSD from a break-up." Nate is officially an asshole. He actually has no idea where this came from. He can't blame it on Brad. He is so incredibly offensive he can feel himself getting red and angry.

"I'm—"

"Yeah—" Nate says, and barely restrains himself from finishing it with a deflated, "fuck you."

He takes back the ID and actually runs out of the bar. He walks home convinced there will be flashing blue-and-red lights behind him any second. He feels like shit, probably because he _is_ that bad.

Even his newfound favorite nighttime activity, the drunk walk, doesn’t seem to be doing its usual wonders. This could be a lot healthier if he had someone to walk with, maybe Rick, but fuck it.

The little patches of grass the city plants on the sidewalk are yellow and burnt out. Relationships are like lawns, Nate reasons, a little unsteadily. If you don’t give them enough attention, they die. Nate wasn’t neglecting to water the lawn, though. He basically had to put himself in a straitjacket to refrain from watering.

Actually, he thinks, fuck that. That wasn’t true at all. That was so far away from the truth. Grass also dies from overwatering. And from piling on the wrong fertilizer, maybe fertilizer that was intended for something else, like flowers. Or corn. Basically, fertilizer is shit. Don’t pile your own shit on top of other people’s problems that you might not even know about. Like aphids. Fucking aphids.

Nate is pretty sure he isn’t making any more sense when he barrels through his apartment and collapses on his bed.

When he wakes up he finds himself involuntarily cringing at his recollection of the night before. Of course, unlike the nights he might have wanted to remember, the nights he really doesn’t want to think about ever again return to him in Technicolor and Dolby surround sound on a daily basis.

 

The next week, though, when Brad doesn’t call at all, Nate realizes something went wrong.

Sitting down in the metro, he calls his sister. He's not sure under what pretenses, but he chirps blithely into the phone: "Hi!"

"Hello," she says cautiously. "Nate?"

"Hi, Kate." They have always been, embarrassingly, Nate and Kate. Apparently their parents hadn’t thought about the repercussions of names as long as Nathaniel and Katherine.

"How are you? You haven't called in a while—"

He accidentally interrupts her. "Good! How are you?"

After a few minutes, the pretenses come to him. "Listen, as the only female presence currently in my life—" she laughs, and then starts to say something sympathetic "—and by extension in my friends' lives, I've got a question for you."

"I'm all ears, baby brother."

"I'm two years younger."

"Yet you can't solve your own problems. Go on, tell me. Someone having fiancé problems?"

"No. Uh..." he starts, and isn't sure where he was going with this. "I, uh...have a friend..."

"Yes," she prompts.

Shit. Shit shit shit. He feels it coming. Why the fuck would he start this here—he is on the subway and in three seconds it's going to happen.

"Nate?"

No, no, he's got this under control. "Uh, my friend...he's, uh, he got—his—"

He was wrong, and now he has to take the phone away from his ear. There are hot tears leaking from his eyes, a few at first, just prickling, and he looks up, thinking he can blink them away—but he's wrong. He puts a hand over his eyes and cries softly. He barely remembers where he is for a second, but he tries not to make a scene and calms the heaving sobs he feels are coming. His phone is emitting his sister's worried voice, turning it into an electronic squawk. "Nate? Nate?"

Nate was wrong, and now, at 5:53 pm, between Farragut West and McPherson Square stations, wearing a suit and tie and—because he is always wrong, even about the weather—no scarf, he is facing the opposite side of the subway and crying. He squeezes the bridge of his nose. It doesn't help. Finally he brings a thumb to press against his mouth and picks up the phone.

"Nate!"

"Yeah," and his voice cracks.

"Nate, are you OK? What's the matter? Are you crying?"

He doesn't know what to say. He's not sure if he's going to admit it. His mouth decides for him, and he says, "No, uh—I—" there's a half-formed story about someone with a baby on the subway, but that is ridiculous, and he instead ends with, "I have to go. Don't worry. I'll call you—" and means to finish that with "later" but hangs up too quickly.

His face is still wet and red and he tries to paw at it with his sleeves. Two interns in blue sports jackets and khakis are staring at him but are polite enough to turn around to make comments. He looks down briefly. There are actual tearstains on his shirt. He is crying on the subway, in public. No one even looks at him until the doors close behind him on Farragut. He has never been so thankful for DC's ruthlessness.

He’s also not watching where he’s going, which may be—but what he will never admit was—the reason he doesn’t see the black Lincoln on his left.

: : :

Nate wakes up in the hospital. There’s a form in the chair near his IV drip, which could be his coat or his mom. He breaks through the haze enough to start feeling guilty about hoping that it’s not the latter when he falls asleep again.

When he wakes up the next time, it’s gone, and it wasn’t his coat. He spends the time before his family arrives wondering who or what it could have been, and eventually blames it on medication side effects.

After his parents and sister and brother-in-law have left, he lowers the bed down and stares at the ceiling. He knows there’s a phone on his left, near the button to call the nurse.

He thinks about calling Brad, but decides it’s a little pathetic. _Hey Brad, I know we’re not talking, potentially ever again, but I got hurt and would like you to feel guilty about it for no particular reason. Have a nice day!_ Nate is grateful that although the drugs may have addled some of his reasoning skills, they have not deteriorated them enough to ever make him think that leaving that on someone’s answering machine would be a good idea.

Nate is still drugged enough not to actively think of sarcastic comments. All things considered, though, he’s not seriously injured. He’s out of the hospital in a few days, and if anything he thinks he’s gained some weight from eating nothing but hospital tapioca pudding and the rotisserie chicken and pasta his mother wouldn’t stop feeding him.

: : :

Nate is celebrating the renewed use of his right arm by amusing himself with clicking on the Google doodle of the day when he gets the phone call.

“Nate Fick,” he says, cradling the phone between his ear and shoulder and opening up a game of Minesweeper. God, he’s missed his right hand.

“I was there, Nate.”

Nate suddenly knows exactly what he’s talking about. He feels the blood drain from his face and into his hands, which are slowly turning bright red.

“I got the fucking call.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, ‘oh.’ When were you going to tell me?”

Nate rubs his forehead. He’s older, wiser, he tells himself. He can talk this one through. “Yeah. That was shitty of me. I’m—I’m sorry, Brad. I really am. I wasn’t…I wasn’t thinking when I did it.”

Brad doesn’t answer, so Nate continues helplessly, “I’m really not sure what I was thinking.” He’s already told himself that he’s going to be honest, so he resolves not to say that he doesn’t know why he did it. Just that he doesn’t know exactly what the thought process was when he actually went to do it.

“That’s not what I meant,” says Brad quietly.

“Oh,” says Nate eloquently. “The other thing.”

“Yeah,” repeats Brad. “The ‘other thing.’”

“Is ‘never’ a good answer?”

“No.”

There’s a pause. “Is it the one you’re looking for, though?”

“Maybe,” says Brad, and he sounds tired.

“Right,” says Nate. “Then you can have that. Good night,” and hangs up the phone. It’s nowhere near his bedtime, but he plans on needing the Nyquil again tonight.

When he does go to bed, he gets under the covers feeling righteously indignant. Brad has no right to be angry about whatever he thinks is “the other thing.” Nate has told him, multiple times, in actions and in words. He doesn’t know why Brad refuses to believe him, or is so convinced that he has some kind of ulterior motive. Nate doesn’t figure it out for a long time.

 

One night, night thirty-something of Brad not calling, Nate is sitting on his couch and trying to summon up some kind of answering emotions. There’s his boot camp photo, him in his dress blues; he smiles a little and pushes it away. His mom has the original; he doesn’t know where this came from. He keeps going. There they all are, by the statue of Saddam. He looks at it for a long time, eyes slowly going over all the faces. Hasser. Person. Espera. Rudy. Pappy. Jacks. Then there’s another photo—just the two of them. There’s nothing special about it. That might be the problem: there’s nothing special about the photo, but his chest is tight and he’s not sure how long he’s been looking at it.

There’s nothing special about it. Nate brings his hand up to cover their uniform pants. It looks like they’re wearing t-shirts, sitting in someone's basement.

It’s not Iraq, it’s Brad. It’s not lingering guilt, it’s Brad. It’s Brad. Fuck. It’s Brad.

: : :

It’s his last day at this job, and Nate is going through his e-mail, sorting out contacts and other stuff he might potentially need later down the line. He gets to the end of his inbox and notices something he hadn’t yet sorted through. It’s still technically unread when Nate clicks on it and opens the link.

He is nowhere near close to being the same person that could convince himself it’s the bad animation or his feelings about George W. Bush or even the bittersweet end to a great work year that make him cry.

 

He calls Brad. Nate doesn’t know exactly what’s going to follow, but whatever does is going to be so woefully inadequate over the phone. He can’t show up to Brad’s apartment unannounced, though. Mostly that’s because Nate acknowledges that his life is not directed by the producers of the Hallmark Channel, and also because he’s afraid of Brad Colbert’s security systems, one of which is undoubtedly Brad Colbert himself.

“I watched the video,” he says, and should have expected Brad’s response.

“What?”

“You know—‘I still won three Purple Hearts?’”

“Nate, it’s three in the morning.”

“Yeah, I know.” He forgot.

“Right. So I’m going to go back to sleep.”

“No—wait! Don’t you remember? Three Purple Hearts?” Nate knows he sounds crazy repeating himself, but he’s still in public and he doesn’t feel like reciting the second most memorable line from the video. If Brad doesn’t get it, though, he realizes he might be forced to utter the words “you’re a pinko-commie” on the not-deserted corner of 14th and U. He hopes it doesn’t come to that.

“Yeah,” sighs Brad, and that sound shouldn’t make Nate feel what it does. “Did you really call about a video I sent you a year ago? The news has even reached England: there were elections. Bush is your president. I’m going back to sleep.”

“Wait! Please,” Nate says. “I—are you awake now?”

“Barely.”

“Brad,” he says, and then for some reason it comes out easily. “I’m not calling you because I want to feel like a Marine again. I don’t think you’re my connection to it anymore. Or at all. I…Jesus, I _just_ figured out that I never realized that I was leaving behind something more meaningful than my own opinions. Or that I was leaving _with_ more than notes for a book. I don’t care about the Corps anymore,” he says, and quickly backtracks. “Fuck. That’s not what I meant. I mean…I can deal with that on its own, as a separate issue, which I acknowledge might actually be an issue itself. I just don’t think it has any place anymore in what I think about when I think of you. At least not as big of a place as it once did.”

Brad’s breathing is steady. He must be holding the phone close to his face.

“Brad?” he says.

“Yeah,” comes the soft reply.

“Honestly it might have never figured into what…I thought and felt about you. I don’t know if it seemed that way, but I was never using you to get back to the platoon or to Iraq or to whatever the fuck I thought I was looking for. If anything I was doing the opposite. I’m sorry that I couldn’t say this earlier, or on my own, without the crutch of disguising my motives, or—” and he smiles a little at the thought, and says it anyway even though it’ll probably leave Brad confused “—Viagra ads. But I guess this is as good as it gets. In terms of epiphanies. And apologies.”

He wants to add “and declarations,” but he figures he’ll quit while he’s ahead and leave it at that.

Nate is expecting more of the careful silence, maybe even a jab at the university system that made him so soft. Instead, Brad says, “That’s good enough.”

“Yeah?” says Nate, gripping the phone harder.

“It’s good enough for me,” Brad says. “Is it for you?”

For a moment Nate isn’t sure where this is going. He didn’t think he was being particularly coy a few moments ago, and he isn’t sure if Brad’s leading him into a trap. He decides, as he always has, to trust Brad.

“It is,” says Nate.

**Author's Note:**

> [This](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8Q-sRdV7SY) is the video.


End file.
